Dating Dash

Orlando Sentinel; Oct. 15, 2002; Linda Shrieves, Sentinel Staff Writer; Copyright 2002

If you want to stay in the running and meet your dream match or simply make new friends, set your timer and start smiling.

Kim Jolie sits down at a candlelit table in the clubby, dark-green dining room of San Snead’s Tavern in downtown Orlando, prepared for the perfect blind date.

Every strand of her blond hair is in place, and she wears a little black dress with spaghetti straps and black heels.  Then she brings out her biggest weapon: a wide smile.

For eight minutes, the 30-year-old public relations staffer smiles and chats with her date.

The, just as they seen to be hitting it off – BING! – a bell signals the end of the date.  Jolie hastily checks the boxes on her scorecard (Want to see him again for a day? For friendship? For business?), then hops to another table for date No. 2.  There she smiles, introduces herself to a Bachelor No. 2 and chats for another eight minutes.

BING! On to date three, BING! Date four, And so on… a nonstop stream of eight abbreviated dates in one night as the 38 people in the room jump from table to table.

Although this may seem like a dating nightmare to the happily married or the temporarily taken, the 8 Minute Dating phenomenon – along with its cousins Hurry Dating, Express Dating, Power Dating – is sweeping the country.

“Speed dating,” as it’s generically known, began in 1999, the brainchild of a Los Angeles rabbi eager to act as a matchmaker for Jewish singles.  Now the concept has branched out across the country – and across ethnic lines – from Austin, Texas, to Chicago to Cleveland to Seattle to Orlando.

In New York, where similar dating events draw 100 or more participants, so many singles are clamoring to participate that organizers have split them into subsets – Jewish singles, Christian singles, athletic singles and so on.

Groups are usually organized by age too, with 25-to 35-years-olds at one event and the over-35 crowd at another.

At prices ranging from $15 to $40, speed dating is cheap, fast and efficient – like a caffeinated version of The Dating Game with a dash of musical chairs thrown in.

It’s rapid-fire dating with little dash of rejection.  Some speed-dating companies estimate that 50 percent of participants get matches, leaving 50 percent who didn’t.  But the rejection doesn’t happen instantaneously, and there’s nothing personal about it.  Call it virtual rejection – done by computer.

After each eight-minuet date, speed dates note on their scorecard whether they’d be interested in a real date with that person.  If both parties want a date, the company’s computer will send them an e-mail a few days later, with the phone number and contact information for their match.

Speed dating may be the most efficient way to find Mr. Or Ms. Right – a notion bound to make engineers smile (whish is good, because they constitute a large number of the men in the room).

But even nonengineers like the time-saving aspect of speed dating.

“I think you know if you click with somebody real soon,” says Jolie. “I’ve been on a lot of dates where you think, ‘When is this going to end?’ ”

Looks Count

In Orlando, where speed dating is still new, most participants are novices – and they’re jittery.

“Everybody comes in nervous,” says Ezra Simmons, the Orlando event organizer behind this 8 Minute Dating Session, “but after the first date, they loosen up and relax.”

At a small table in the restaurant, Simmons hands participants their randomly assigned seats for their randomly selected eight dates.  Then they don their nametags, emblazoned with only their first name and a three-digit code – which the computer will use later to pair successful matches.

The result is an eerie science fiction vision, a roomful of dateable participants known only as Melissa 413 or Mike 919 or Gavin 903.

Last names are no-nos, and participants are forbidden to hand out their phone numbers or tell where they work – largely to prevent unwanted phone calls.

Nametags in pace the group, most of them in the prescribed 22-to-32 age range, mingle nervously before the dating begins.  A computer programmer with thinning hair sweats visible, watching the parade of pretty women.

Everyone feels self-conscious.  Three women in a corner confess that they’re checking out the other women, wondering how they stackup.  The men, meanwhile, wonder what the women think of them.  Says on advertising account executive: “You think to yourself, ‘Are they going to look at me like I’m  desperate?’”

Make no mistake on an eight-minute date, looks count. “You can’t avoid it,” says Jolie.  “That’s one of your first impressions.”

The faint of heart find the first 15 minutes nerve-racing.  One woman in her late 20s admits that she’s ready to back out, although she has registered and paid in advance.  Simmons encourages her to stay, so she relents.  But one guy walks up, sees the crowd and panics.  He is coming off a recent breakup, he says, and one look convinces him that he isn’t ready for the singles seen yet.

Every event is designed to have the same number of men and women, so there’s often a waiting list (for information check 8minutedating.com).

Tonight, though, two men don’t show up.  Simmons is in luck, however, because two other guys called up from the waiting list do arrive just in time to fill the vacant spots.

One is Shaun Roberts, a 23-year-old sales manager form Altamonte Springs.  The boisterous, fun-loving Roberts breaks the tension in the air immediately by joking with most of the women – and men – around him.  By the fourth date of the night, he brands the evening a success.

“I liked every single one of the women but one” – who didn’t like his loud, animated sense of humor – says Roberts.  “I would love to just be friends with them.” He also met some guys he thought  “would be fun to hang out with.”

Roberts, like many of the participants, is relatively new to Orlando.  He moved here a year ago from Melbourne and sees speed dating as a fun way to meet women and make new friends.

Speed dating appeals not just for newcomers such as Robert but to those who aren’t interested in the bar scene.  For instance, 23-year-old Gavin Frase is training for a spot on the Olympic crew team in 2004. He doesn’t drink while in training, and late nights on the singles bar scene don’t help his Olympic chances either.

The idea also clicks with people who work in professions dominated by one sex.  Tonight, the room is peppered with female teachers and male engineers, who find that their work-places don’t provide much chance for romance.

And nightclubs, they’ve discovered, aren’t the answer.

“Girls usually go to clubs in packs,” says Jim Moore, a 30-year-old computer programmer.  “It’s always intimidating.  How do you introduce yourself to a pack?”

Bars aren’t great place for women to find dated either.

“People go to bars to have fun,” says Jolie.  “They’re not looking for relationships.”

8 Minutes can be long

With speed dating, the search for relationship can run anywhere from three minutes to eight or nine.

Mike Weiner, who has tried the concept at other Orlando venues, says eight minutes may be just right.

“The only bad thing about eight minutes is that if it’s a terrible date, that feels like a very lone time,” says Weiner, and Orlando software engineer.

Indeed, over the course of the evening, one woman doodles through conversations, and a few others struggle to make conversation with one or two people who aren’t great talkers.

Samantha Aldous, a 26-year-old teacher and writer, feels out of place.  Many of the men she’s been paired with are three or four years younger, she says.  And they’re not the creative types she was hoping to find.  “Half of the people were cook, though they were people I would never normally talk to.  But eight minutes, inmost cases, was too long.”

By the time the last date ends, after nearly two hours of musical chairs, some participants are hopeful, others discouraged.  They wander to the bar to commiserate or, in some cases, continue the party.

Aldous, meanwhile, is disappointed – but decided on an optimistic spin.

“If nothing else,” she laughs, “this hones your interviewing skills.”